Thorns Wear Roses
by Zaedah
Summary: In the vastness of human achievement, no man has mastered the rooster.
1. Preface

_Almost a preface._**  
**

* * *

**Thorns Wear Roses**

_**And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro' nature, moulding men. **_

_**Alfred Lord Tennyson**_

* * *

It is darkest where they stand.

The sun struggles to throw off the heavy blanket, peeking under an untucked corner of night to glimpse the world below. And decide if it wants to venture further. For the moment, it seems to hold a negative opinion of waking. The option to dislodge from comforting clutches is weighed and dismissed. And so darkness compels time forward without its promissory light.

Humans are fashioned in such a half-life as this.

Blackness clings to woolen coats, fabric too chilled in the uninspired degrees to provide protection. The temperature has heard the rumor of warmth but forges no agreement with the concept. Two hours before, a group had met to sip the false high and fading heat of coffee. Two had separated from the huddle to venture into the frost. The lake has iced at the edges, sweeps of water lapping beneath the splintered crust of gray. There they remain, loitering in an overgrown park feeding half-asleep ducks. Stale crumbs adhere to frozen beaks.

Crumbs constitute their lead.

Someone shuffles behind them, soiled and ancient, humming three songs at once. Harmless, limping and unconcerned with the cold and the company. Poverty no longer mourning luxury. Cataract eyes pushed past a fraying hoodie weigh out the ducks, then lust after the bread.

The woman will part with four slices, if only to provide an excuse for remaining here. Helping the hungry. As though watching eyes would see an innocent cause in their waiting. Her silent companion might, in daylight, have been said to raise an eyebrow. In this void, such subtleties are lost.

But not the whispers.

There needs to be discourse to maintain the play of purpose. A normal couple. A simple matter. Buried in quiet complaints over the cold are messages meant for the wire. _Nothing yet. No movement. No sign._

Motion eventually comes and shivering limbs extend to greet it. Two handshakes. An envelope exchanged. A job accepted. The thin thread stitched into the woman's collar catches the identifiers she has slipped – interesting mole, sorry about the earlobe. The unnamed man scurries away, diving back into a stubborn corner still clutching its side of the covers.

The sun has heeded the final alarm and climbs the clouds in a geriatric arc. It strains to light the departing man's capture one hundred yards from the exchange. Knees driven to the pavement. The body follows. Face pushed against nature's frozen exhalation.

Dawn exposes a glittering world and the homeless man collecting leftover crumbs. Hurried footfalls crunch on the frosted surface toward a collection of limbs. A half dozen men secure one courier, pressing upon a small body unable to resist the weight of tactically geared men. Beneath the pile, the man with a mole and chewed earlobe laughs. Laughs as one with an empty pocket and four aces.

The hidden vest beeps.

Detonates.


	2. Walls

**Thorns Wear Roses**

**2**

* * *

_**There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.**_

_**Alfred Lord Tennyson**_

* * *

The hidden vest beeps.

Detonates. Fizzles. Dies. The only thing that does.

The woman breathes like a sprinter while standing still, perfecting the surprised shock that mirrors the strangers gathering nearby. She looks to her partner. Knows what comes next. They have maintained distance from the fray, they and the ducks serving as fearful onlookers. A pair of fowl have fluttered deeper into the cold water, one more tilting a green head toward the man being hauled away.

Her partner's hand fuses to her elbow, stilling whatever instinct to rush the scene he must fear she has. Agent David will not remind him that the strategic nemesis of impulse has his own name stitched to its label. But Agent DiNozzo's jaw is tight, eyes owing the bright rim of menace to the yawning light.

"Don't break cover," their leader huffs into their ear pieces. "We've got this."

"Roger that."

The pair watch openly, as the innocently curious will, while the small man is folded into the backseat of a black Escalade. Close enough to note that his capture produces neither syllable nor sound from the bomb-frustrated man. The manila envelope so recently in the man's hand, nine-by-twelve and sealed, wrinkles under the force of Tony's fingers. There's something solid weighing down one corner.

"Tony," comes the warning and the order to move. One word, enough to bring events into submission.

And one word of acceptance is all the tall man will throw into a resurgent wind, in a whisper heavy with all that could have gone wrong. But there is a job. And that has been the point to this street theater.

* * *

"Our new employer was not there," Ziva surmises in the quiet warmth of a nondescript car. "Was not watching."

This is not an unknown. Yet silence is a jar that opens its lid for filling. Three red lights, two greens and one yellow and then he speaks;

"Didn't need to watch. One thing to kill the messenger. Another to have the messenger kill himself."

The question, who was the man willing to die for, does not require voicing. But at the next stop sign, the first of a series stabbing the dry ground of an unnamed borough, DiNozzo asks. Her breath will mist over a tiny section of window glass when she exhumes old beliefs.

"Perhaps not who but what. Many offer their lives less to a figure than an ideal."

"For holy war, they usually spit out rhetoric all the way to jail," Tony muses. "Fear? That's usually when action suffices."

"Did he not have the most," her hand takes up an uncertain orbit, "blank face?"

"Needed some sun. And a better bomb designer."

The envelope rests on Ziva's thighs as the car stalks the midday light. The disappointed courier will be deposited in interrogation. Forensics on the items once in his possession will have to wait. A sheet of paper, torn from a yellow legal pad, contains an address and a name written in the sort of penmanship that makes engineers sob. Precise, measured letters. Crisp. Perfect. Both are run through the system. Neither connects to elements known or crimes past.

The paper's companion, a burn phone, is a veteran of multiple tours. Handled roughly and dropped often. There is dirt under the keypad and a crack across the screen. Ziva had considered snapping on latex gloves but her partner's raised eyebrow spoke to the fruitlessness. From the driver's seat, DiNozzo detects the scratches where steel wool has been applied. Repeatedly. The grime of misuse is all that holds the device together.

It doesn't ring. But it will.

* * *

The courier offers no figure. No ideal.

On the long rim of an interrogation table, speech is withheld. As though weighing out the government's threats against a greater dark. One will question, another will demand, yet more will research independent of uncooperative sources. In a day that sees the sun resistant to rousing and now disinterested in sleep, two will pound on pavements, doors and pulses while another two drive endlessly west.

The nameless messenger lasts the day.

The courier is a pale, fair man on whom the standard orange gear sags loosely. What he does not voice is paced in a diagonal path across a sparse cell. Every footfall tells of failure. The guards tire of watching the video screen of this pattern, northeast corner to southwest corner and back again.

Walls make cells. But necessities make an end.

A methodically torn strip of bedding is the escape of one who prefers a messier death by explosion. A louder statement, the only one he'd expected to give. There will be stars in the sky that he will never see. Whether they twinkle in spite of him or to mourn will earn no contemplation. The small man would need a heartbeat to manage that.

On a closed channel comes the report of dangling feet.

* * *

The uneven paint on the compact sedan catches the streetlights. Darkness dotted with neon will not improve the looks. While its fading interior refuses to accommodate the driver's cramping legs, miles are quickly added to the odometer. The sun has gone back to bed in this direction and they give chase.

The digitalized chirping tone of a prepaid phone erupts halfway to midnight.


	3. Test

**Thorns Wear Roses**

**3**

* * *

_**You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.**_

_**Alfred Lord Tennyson**_

* * *

It is a town without a reputation.

Ordinances require a name to be bestowed, regardless of whether the plot between a tiny airport and a tinier diner merits a moniker. Hill Vista is possessed of neither hill nor vista, a place the economy has not troubled, has never entered. A place beholden not to progress or prospects. The sole evidence of life on this single, unlined, unlit strip of road is a wooden sign hanging between two rotting posts. The painted letters announce a motel. A motel of the sort that bodes merely by being. Of the sort that no one had bothered to christen.

Into a spiral notebook, the clerk registers the two strangers who arrive with the late blooming stars. They are of a suspicious nature, his darting eye informs. And that is better tolerated with tips. Elderly and likely the owner, the man's boxlike face suggests an escape from a punishingly square birth canal. The spine is meant for sitting while his odor stands apart. The presumed unwed couple is shown to the first room on the left, twin beds pushed near enough for suggestion while maintaining a fifties' sitcom propriety.

They decline.

"I must have an east-facing window," the foreign woman says.

Religion is inconsequential to the clerk, but the inconvenience appears grave. Still, eyes dulled with years and boredom travel to the man's hip, anticipating what the leather coat hides. There is a surplus of silence during which a decision is reached, recalculated and settled once more.

Into the darkened corridor stiff legs limp, shoving open a different door, offering no apology for the lack of sheets. If the new room is insufficient, they can whisper cruelties to their pagan gods on bare mattresses.

Walls give the impression of a distant association with ivory paint. A block of bland unornamented and, in fairness, unnoticed. Critiques are carefully folded into sighs, a conservation of energy. There is activity once the clerk departs, a haste tempered by careful fingers. What is shifted out of place, inspected and cataloged is returned to place.

"No bugs," one verifies.

"No surveillance," the other confirms.

There is nearly a sound as the immediacy is relaxed. Outside the double window, stars rescind their earlier aid and tuck away behind cloud cover. A sense that the world is finished for the night.

Ziva hunts for a thermostat, presently set to tropical elsewhere. There is no unit here, nor a clock, nor a lightbulb on her overhead lamp. Groans will note the quality of the mattress, the man regretting his gravity-assisted drop onto the surface of the bed nearest the door without prior assessment.

"Serta," Tony grumbles, "manufactured by masochists."

Ziva's dark head disappears into the bathroom. "Shower's designed by sadists."

Her small frame will test the dimensions of the altered broom closet. The drains prove inadequate as her shower approaches a bath within minutes. There is no dirt clinging to her skin, but knuckles will scrub off the last three states as though their dust had hitchhiked. Under the glaring sun and beneath crippling dark, she has endured confinement that will not rinse away. The company had been tense, a condition inflicting them both. Not unpleasant, but concern had killed conversation.

Her partner's eyes are not available to take in her rose-rubbed flesh. Ziva straightens the loose clothes puckering along damp joints. Her bed is closest to the window, promising a risen sun in hours. A dark backpack waits on her nightstand. Tony's own pack is close to tumbling off the lumpy rectangle straining to qualify as a pillow. Reaching inside his bag, her fingers scan a small compartment, empty of the lockpicks and modified bug detector.

Before the soothing act of gun maintenance can be completed, someone drums fingers on the motel door twice. Warning and assuring. The door swings open, Tony enters and puts the gear to bed. A second ill-advised flop and his eyelids preserve his vision from contemplating the unframed print taped to the wall.

Sweeping the first room had been assuaging curiosity, but experience ingrains thoroughness. Ziva shakes out her hair, letting the remaining droplets provide the sole contact with cleanliness this mattress will know. More water is deposited as they both turn to the ringing phone. The sticky surface is held to her ear and after a sharp _hello_, she waits. As before, there is no response on the other end.

Earlier, the car's engine had muffled the background sounds but now a trained ear detects a breath. Barely that. Then a dial tone erupts.

"Another test."

Their availability is not in question. Undoubtedly tracked from a distance, someone is ensuring they have followed the envelope's address, verifying their arrival at the location. In a wrongly-named town at a no-name motel with a clerk on the take. This employer selects federal agents to perform, to play. Therefore he must come to this scheme prepared.

They had rejected a south-facing and entirely wired room.

A moment later, a text message arrives. A stated purpose. An ideal.

_Crime is an industry. Welcome._


	4. Words

**Thorns Wear Roses**

**4**

_**Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.**_

_**Alfred Lord Tennyson**_

In the vastness of human achievement, no man has mastered the rooster.

The proud male forces a raspy shout into the atmosphere, seeking to frighten the clouds that dull his world. There is, he will swear in throaty screamings, a magnificent sunrise above the persistent overcast. Its squawks have no pity for sleepers. The shaving of a moon uses the clouds to guard her modesty and is reluctant to let her thin figure come to daylit scrutiny.

The lightness seeps through the gray without her consent. A victory for the rooster.

An influx of tractor trailers is similarly cruel. Hill Vista, while not a destination in itself, adheres to the concept that there is a somewhere else to head toward on the other side. Drivers break laws to see that promise fulfilled. Tires rub the concrete raw along Main Street, past the motel and one stop sign at the border of town that pleads for another chance. Only the hollow of soul might loiter willfully within the confines of such nothingness.

Which is unfortunate. Because the masses miss the diner.

The morning special must be brought to the booth one plate at a time, two hands required. The cook has heard of beauty in passing and preserves it in her food. Her tongue has had five decades to learn restraint. Her smile is fixed with plaster.

The female stranger is pleasant but not as social as Ginny likes perspective daughters-in-law to be. Cold as the field but warm around the fencing, like someone practicing civility. By necessity and design. The dark-haired woman's suitability for the waitress's son is further ruined by her companion. Ginny's internal radar is, like many ancient things, a work of craftsmanship. The name for men like this one has no polite alternative, charm sweeter than the blue ribbon syrup and quick to break the temporary things they possess. Still, hers is a wrinkled blush served with hash browns.

DiNozzo assembles his smile, tweaks it at one corner for the audience.

"Is there a map of Hill Vista?"

"Map?" Ginny refills his coffee before he's downed a sip. "Ain't but one road. End to end, won't take three minute's walk to sight-see."

Ziva weighs the decorating scheme, minimalism born of poverty. "There must be side roads off the main."

"You'd think that. Our one alley at the north is actually Lakewood and the little shopping strip at the south end is technically Lawnview."

"So where's the hill of Hill Vista?"

The matron stores embarrassment in the folds of her apron, a complaint to be lodged with the city planners. "Well, about halfway down Main there's a speed bump."

She returns to her pastry rack to worry over the placement of pies. Savory potatoes are attacked. Stuffed omelets are devoured. Tony leans back against the patchwork booth, a man satisfied.

"The vista is best seen from the dizzying heights of the speed bump."

His partner drains her mug. "I shall ready the camera."

The car's grill arrives at the south end before the back bumper has left the diner's lot. Ziva adds a fresh layer of duct tape to the burn phone, their contribution to its stubborn existence. She's not yet secured the final side when it rings.

Forward progress ends outside a farm equipment store in Lawnview, interior lights blazing in the closed hours. A blight to environmentalists and an invitation to thieves. The parking lot is barren and pot-holed. The talk button is pressed, followed by speakerphone and Ziva offers no greeting to the slightly crackled line.

"Some months ago, word arrived of your dissatisfaction with the government-run circus." It is a voice rubbed with turpentine until raw, the sound of a beast composed of oil and grit. "What makes two agents betray the lion tamer and stray from the three rings?"

"We have earned a larger cut of cake."

Beside her, a muttered complaint about slices of pie. The car has been shut off, cold already leeching between the gaps in the undercarriage. A hurried text is being sent to a smart man in a distant office. _Contact made._

"You see what the criminals have and you want it?"

"We have seen what they have," Ziva says, "and expect more"

In the moment between, both agents tilt their heads to catch something, anything to suggest the caller's location. There is no ancillary noise for the human ear to perceive and they must trust the circus to detect on playback what they cannot.

"And your partner is in agreement?"

Her grin is a clap of thunder. "He defers to me in these matters."

"Then what of his role?"

"He is the actor. I direct the scene."

A collection of seagulls have strayed from a distant shore to greet the cooling vehicle with warning calls. Tony watches them flap and scurry. Actively deferring, he will later say.

"And I, my friends, write the play. The poet says, '_Tis not too late to seek a newer world_.'"

Ziva blinks against the emerging orange sun. "Is that what you seek? A newer world?"

"You seek the larger cake, the more. I merely invite you to the table."

Explanation has an expiration date timed to the minute. The disconnected line sounds through the rapidly freezing interior and the driver restarts the car quickly. Before the phone can be released, a message arrives. A new address.

"I love it when you talk cinema," her partner tosses into the brittle frost.

* * *

**This story is may not produce a true end. We shall see. However, I am nearly ready to post the epilogue to Symbiosis, which shall conclude my fanfiction career.**


End file.
